WHAT IS INTEGRATED HEALTH? CONVENTIONAL AND TRADITIONAL MEDICINE: LEARNING TO LIVE TOGETHER

I started my practice, having qualified in the conventional way, and quickly became aware of the perspective I have just described. The majority of the population of India, where I started practice, were well served by the traditional culture. When medical assistance was required it was available in the form of Ayurvedic or Unani physicians, whose university course incidentally lasts six years and is entirely comparable with a conventional course. The people who practised traditional medicine over the centuries were not amateur quacks as some would have us believe, but of an intellectual level equivalent to that of any conventional doctor, and they passed on their learning and expertise from generation to generation. The same could be said of Chinese traditional practitioners and these together provide the principal medical care today for a third of the world's population. To those who may try and brush this aside as 'third world', let me add that Japan and Hong Kong are in the forefront of modern civilisation yet they too have more traditional practitioners than conventional ones and have the highest territory-wide life expectancy in the world as well.

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